Sovereignty is like one of those lead-weighted dolls you can never get to lie down. One might have thought that multiple changes in the global and regional landscape had worked in the modern age to limit the salience of the concept. States’ economic freedom of action has been limited by enormous economic and financial interdependence. Their legal freedom of action has been limited by multiple developments in international law, especially international humanitarian and human rights law. And their political freedom of action has been inhibited to at least some extent by peer-group pressure to address multiple global-public-goods and globalcommons-protection issues. Many of these can only be tackled effectively by cooperative action, involving some subjugation of traditionally defined national economic and security interests to the larger regional or global interests. But, for all that, sovereignty talk, and its close cousin nationalist talk, are alive and well in the Asia Pacific, no less than everywhere else in the world, and maybe even a little more so